Key areas we will cover in chapter 9:

• ✓ you are what you share
• ✓ you’ve connected — now what?
• ✓ keeping in touch with your connections
• ✓ applying your good manners.

It might seem a little obvious that you need to behave online as you would in person, but for some reason we sometimes see the two differently and so act differently. You’ve probably seen snarky comments from individuals or conversations going off on a tangent and wondered why. The truth is, we have no body language to go on so we have to make do with ‘digital body language’ and use the tools we have at our disposal.

Let’s have a look at some of the things we can do to make sure we don’t upset anyone.

You are what you share

Everything you post online stays there forever and is a direct reflection on you, so beware of posting things that you wouldn’t want your mother to see! You don’t have to write everything yourself, but at least be aware of the whole content of what you are posting if it is an article from another source, and always include the link to the original article. That way, the rightful owner of the content gets the attribution. Remember, ‘you are what you share’.

Working with original content

So where will your content come from? Once you have started your social media plan from chapter 1, you should have a clear understanding of what your social media efforts are going to achieve for you.

Your content will come from:

• personal content: your own efforts from articles, videos and blog posts
• third-party content: respected industry online publications. The emphasis here is on respected, professional and interesting content.

When it comes to third-party content, it is important you don’t simply copy the article onto your site and make it your own, as you could find yourself in trouble for a copyright breach. It is, however, perfectly acceptable to mention what the article is about and link back to the original article so that the original author gets the attribution.

Making connections with LinkedIn

Very few people ignore you in real-life, face-to-face networking situations, so why do they online? The simple answer is because they probably don’t realise they are! There are many things we do online that we wouldn’t dream of doing in person, so let’s go through a few of them to make sure you stand out for being a pleasure to know online.

Think about whether you follow up every LinkedIn connection request you get. Many people simply click ‘accept’ and think no more of it. When someone requests to connect with you and you click ‘accept’ with no effort to carry on the conversation, you are basically saying ‘hello’ and ending the conversation there. All you gain by doing this is a string of connections that don’t have any real value: you become a connection collector, which you wouldn’t do when face-to-face networking as that would be rude.

So how can you use social etiquette to really make your LinkedIn connections valuable and to stand out from the crowd at the same time? I suggest you view LinkedIn as your own boardroom of connections versus your coffee-shop connections on Twitter or Facebook. Your connections on LinkedIn tend to be managers, directors, business owners, CEOs and the like, and could be a very different set of connections from those on your Facebook page.

Send personalised connection requests

When you first send a possible contact an invitation on LinkedIn, do it from their profile page by clicking the ‘connect’ button.

We will use Paul as an example. By adding Paul this way rather than just going to the ‘add connections’ tab, you can send a personalised message, such as, ‘Thanks for the coffee yesterday. It was great to catch up’. This gives you the opportunity to remind Paul where you know him from, which is particularly useful if you’re getting back in touch after a long period of time, such as with someone from an old job or your school days.

If you send a connection request from the ‘add connections’ box, there is no facility to personalise your message, so avoid this where possible. It might be a quick and easy way to add a handful of new connections, but it’s much better to spend the time and do it right by adding your personal touch to each one individually.

Reply when accepting a connection request

All too often I receive the standard email from LinkedIn that says a connection request has been accepted, but I rarely get a short message from the new connection at least saying ‘hi’.

When Paul has accepted my connection request, he could then send a short message back. I like to take a look at my new connection’s profile if I am not too familiar with them, and find something I can comment on. Maybe he comes from my hometown, or works for a company I know well, or perhaps I can see from his interests that he too is a cyclist. Whatever it may be, try and find something to start a short conversation and build on your relationship together: make the effort to find out more, just as you would in person.

I’ve covered a couple of the initial and basic steps we tend to forget about, so now let’s look at composing a message to a group of connections on LinkedIn.

Keep in touch with your connections

You can send a message to only 50 people at a time and this is a good thing — otherwise I am sure you would see a lot of spam — but there are a couple of things to note here.

If you’re sending an email to a group of connections, think about your greeting. How are you going to address them? I suggest you start with something like ‘Hi everyone’ or ‘Greetings to you all’ and then immediately say ‘Please excuse my lack of personalisation in this email as I am sending this out to a group of connections’. That way, you can be forgiven and you have addressed any possible bad-manners critics. Or personalise them by creating the messages one at a time. Unfortunately, you can’t hide the names of everyone within the ‘conversation’, though actual email addresses are not visible.

Consider your message content

If you want your connections to leave you in droves, then feel free to write about all the good things you do or your company offers! I have made this mistake in the past myself until I came to my senses. I realised I needed to treat this form of communication the same way as my newsletters — that is, by adding valuable resources. People don’t want to hear about you and what you can offer all the time, but they do want to know how you may be able to help fix their problems.

One example of a message to my connections looked like figure 9.1.

There was nothing in the message about my company — only three bits of information I thought would be great to pass on. It contained a reference to a great book that most businesses could probably utilise, a free event being put on by two companies and a website that may save a business a bit of money.

By keeping in touch this way, my aim is to add value but, at the same time, to put myself back on the radar of my connections.

Ask for recommendations

Recommendations are a valuable part of your LinkedIn profile and could be the one thing that gets you the deal when a possible client is assessing you against your competitor. Most people only have a couple of recommendations, so you can stand out from the crowd by having a large number of genuine and applicable ones. A good number to aim for is 10.

You will notice that the recommendation request form is another auto-generated template, so it needs personalising: you will need to personalise both the body of the message and the subject line. I like to change mine to read something like ‘Recommendation request’ as the subject line and ‘Are you able to write a recommendation about the presentation I did for your company last week?’ in the main body. Don’t make the request too long, but be clear on what you want a recommendation for.

If you are asking Paul for a recommendation about a seminar he attended that you spoke at, you could change the message to say, ‘I hope you enjoyed the seminar last week. If you feel that you are able to write a brief recommendation about how you found my presentation and speaking skills, I would appreciate it. I totally understand if you would prefer not to. Kind regards …’

There is no need to open your message with ‘Dear …’, as LinkedIn will automatically add that in for you — just choose your greeting from the drop-down box.

In a nutshell, you should look at personalising every aspect of LinkedIn that you can, making each and every standard template your own. It may take you a little longer, but the value you’ll get from doing the job right will far outweigh the effort.

Ask yourself, if you were meeting face to face, what would you be doing differently? People easily judge on first impressions, so make yours a great one each and every time you connect.

Applying good manners online

So what about etiquette for the other sites, including Facebook? I asked fellow speaker, author and trainer Kevin Knebl what he thinks about social media etiquette for both business and pleasure. Kevin spends his days educating companies big and small on the benefits of using social media and being social to one another. This is what he said.

Facebook is the world’s largest high school reunion. When I graduated from high school in 1982, back when the Earth was cooling, I had a little black book that contained my girlfriend’s phone number and the phone numbers of some of my drinking buddies. Facebook isn’t a mood ring, pet rock or hula hoop. It’s been here a long time with no sign of leaving: it’s growing every day.

Communication platforms are always changing. I’m sure that the telephone was a real shocker for the smoke signal and two cans and a string set. Facebook is just one of the current state-of-the-art tools in terms of communication platforms. And that’s an important point: it’s a communication channel. In a more and more interconnected, over-caffeinated, hyper-competitive, 24/7/365 world, Facebook is a great way to stay in touch with huge numbers of people, take the pulse of society and generally keep in contact with the world.

The paradox is that while we’re all connecting online, there is not a lot different about our communication styles. I often have people ask me after my speaking engagements, ‘How should I be online?’ My answer is usually, ‘Well, unless you have a multiple-personality disorder, you should be pretty much the way you are offline’. No matter where you go, there you are.

All things being equal, people do business with and refer business to people they know, like and trust. By this point in the twenty-first century most of us have gotten past the Madison Avenue slick come-on lines we’re constantly fed. I don’t know about you, but I’m looking for authenticity, transparency and honesty. Save the slickness. Just tell me the truth. I can make an intelligent buying decision based on truth and appreciation for the consumer. The smart businesses know this and treat their customers with respect.

On the social side of social networking, when someone sends you a ‘friend request’ on Facebook, you can click on their name and check out their profile before you accept their request. This is probably a smart move. You wouldn’t just accept someone’s request to connect by mail or phone without knowing who you are connecting with, would you? The same goes for social networking. Only now you can learn about someone far more thoroughly than you could prior to social networking. Whatever you post on your Facebook wall and other online profiles is pretty much public information depending on your privacy settings. You now have the ability to see what someone is posting on their Facebook wall (to a degree), which groups they are a member of, who their friends are and much more information, which gives you some insight into who they are. By extension, this allows you to determine who you are connecting with, with far greater accuracy than in the past.

But no matter how sophisticated you are at social networking, it will never be a replacement for good social skills. And this is huge. Most people figure out what they want to do for a living and forget that unless they are Tom Hanks living on a deserted island with a volleyball named Wilson, people skills are a critical piece of their success puzzle. And herein lies a huge paradox. No matter how many connections you have on social networking platforms, it’s all about relationships. You don’t have a relationship with your computer; you have a relationship ‘through’ your computer. So no matter how sophisticated technology gets, we still build true relationships the old-fashioned way — by taking a sincere interest in people.

The sophisticated person understands that huge doors of opportunity swing on little hinges. When we take a sincere interest in other people, we can build relationships — real relationships, not just a connection. You can ‘connect’ with the whole world but if you don’t really connect, you may as well be looking at a worldwide phonebook.

Emojis

While they may seem a little childish on the surface, smiley, angry and other emotion icons are a great way to show the tone you are trying to get across in a comment. For example, how would you read this comment:

I don’t know how you have the time to write such posts.

You could take that comment one of two ways. Either they are having a dig at you because you should be doing something more productive, or they are in awe that you have the time to write such posts. If you don’t know the person, you have no context for how they mean it and could quite easily be upset by it and shoot back a reply that is over the top, sending the individual into a spin. However, if they added a smiley emoji to their comment, you would instantly know the spirit in which the comment was intended. Emojis can save an awful lot of headaches!

Conclusion of chapter 9

Remember to be yourself online and then you won’t forget your natural online manners either.

If you are well known for supplying great information, it will go a long way to establishing your online brand, so it’s important to keep up the great content part of your plan. Use a good proportion of your own material, but no more than, say, about 30 per cent: you don’t want to be seen as a spammer.